InsightCIO & CMO Collaboration

CIO & CMO Collaboration

We are in the “Age of the Customer”. No longer is business making the rules. The customer is king. Customers are more educated and empowered than ever. With the capabilities to blog, Tweet, Facebook and Yelp opinions, customers are on a stage with an audience of hundreds to potentially thousands. This leaves little room for error, but ample room for opportunity.

“To serve customers well, firms must recognize that they will leverage many channels and that those channels must deliver a seamless customer experience.”

The opportunity is in customer engagement. We can easily collect vast amounts of data from various channels and devices. The key is to capture the right data and translate into deep insights that reveal the customer’s needs, wants and buying behaviors. This allows companies to build better products and services while enhancing and customizing the customer experience. As Forrester Research sums it up, “To serve customers well, firms must recognize that they will leverage many channels and that those channels must deliver a seamless customer experience.” While new or improved products are nice, being competitive isn’t enough these days. It’s about staying relevant throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

With the customer being center stage and the abundance of data surrounding them, it is imperative for the CMO and CIO to forge a strong partnership. Advice from Forrester reinforces, “As CMOs and CIOs look to turn collaboration into action, they must change their processes to better evaluate their shared strengths and weaknesses and identify opportunities for improvement.” CMOs must develop a more technical mentality. CIOs must grow into a customer service mentality. Both must share a business-driven agenda centered on the customer’s experience. To achieve results, the CIO and CMO must work together because in today’s customer-driven business world, the collaboration of both roles are needed to create more value, more revenue, and make a greater impact.